Article Critique: “an Integrated Model of Weekday Stress and Weekend Recovery of Students”

The research article by Ragsdale, Beehr, Grebner, and Han was a research study done at Central Michigan University regarding recovery and recovery activities. The goal of the research was to try and study the concept of recovery, the activities, and the consequent recovery experiences jointly, rather than separately. The researchers measured weekend-activities and the resulting well-being from those activities, in relation to stressors experiences during the weekday. Specific measures were role-ambiguity, workload, recovery activities, recovery experiences, recovery quality, need for recovery, and psychological strain.

The study found that both role-ambiguity and psychological strain were positively related to the need for recovery at the end of the week. Workload was found to be positively related to need for recovery and psychological strain. All recovery experiences related largely to recovery quality, with relaxation and control being the largest factors. An interesting result is that “resource-consuming recovery activities were negatively related to some recovery experiences, for example psychological detachment (r -.31) and relaxation (r -.24), suggesting spending more time on resource-consuming recovery activities may be detrimental to the recovery experiences”. Not surprisingly, need for recovery showed an extremely strong relation to psychological strain (r .64).

It was also found positive paths from resource-providing activities to psychological detachment, relaxation, and control experiences were significant, but that mastery was not. Negative paths from resource-consuming activities to psychological detachment and relaxation were significant, but paths from control and mastery were not significant. Three of the four recovery experiences were found to be significant in relation to recovery quality, mastery being the experience that was not.

Ways to improve this research would include sampling a larger sample size with a more diverse group of...